Writer/Director Troy Duffy Discusses New Boondock Saints Video Game

John Gaudiosi
, ContributorI've been covering video games, Hollywood and technology for 20 yearsOpinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own.

Troy Duffy has been busy expanding The Boondock Saints franchise. The writer/director’s latest endeavor is a new video game from Critical Mass Interactive, Inc. (CMI) that will feature the voices and likeness of actors Sean Patrick Flanery (Connor MacManus), Norman Reedus (Murphy MacManus) and David Della Rocco (Rocco) from the two Boondock Saints movies.

The game is part of a bigger transmedia push that Duffy is overseeing, which includes a comic book series and a potential television series or third feature film. Fresh off a transmedia panel at SXSW in Austin, Duffy talks about what’s next for the MacManus brothers in this exclusive interview.

How did the idea of turning BoondockSaints into a video game come about?

It all seemed to go hand in glove. The Boondock property was always about -- even with comic books and video games -- good guys against the bad guys with lots of guns and that type of thing. It always kind of fit. We always had the idea in our head to do that as a shooter game. We just never had run into anybody that really got Boondock.

Where does this game fit in to the overall universe if we focus on the two movies?

It’s not really going to be dictated by the plot of the films, word for word. I’m sure that we can include characters, some of the worlds that were there, and some of the scenes that were there, but we want to expand that. That’s one of the things about doing video games that I hadn’t realized. For a video game, obviously, the landscape has got to be much bigger, so we’re going to have a lot more universes to go into than just following the film. It will just be an underlying theme of the film throughout.

Do you expect to have both the likenesses and the voices of the central characters from the film in the video game?

Yes. All the actors are on board.

How do you see this game tying into the broader expansion of this franchise that includes comic books?

There’s a lot of the artwork that could tie in from menu boards and stuff like that. Ultimately, there’s always been a link between comic books and video games, and comic books and movies, and then basically all three steadily becoming this sort of transmedia. There’s already a link between these things just with the fans. People like video games, comic books, and movies together. We kind of did it the reverse way. Most people would start out with a comic book, make a movie, and then a game. We started out, obviously, with a movie, then we made a comic book, and then the game. It seemed that Boondock always had that feel to it.